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The explosive adoption of video-enabled wireless mobile devices has caused an explosion of data traffic and exposed the capacity constraints of conventional wireless network topology.
Conventional wireless network (e.g. cellular network) deployment requires careful planning to maximize frequency reuse, minimize coverage dead zones and minimize inter-cell interference. The deployment is labour intensive due to significant amount of measurements and field trials. To reduce the cost of deployment, many network operators deploy macro cells which provide larger coverage footprint and higher capacity. This approach works when the subscribers' service types are mainly conversational (i.e. voice), interactive (e.g. web browsing, instant messaging etc.) or low rate streaming. These are the typical service types for 2G (e.g. GSM) and early 3G (e.g. UMTS Release 99 and CDMA2000) cellular networks where macro cell provides adequate quality of service to fulfill majority subscriber's needs.
More subscribers demand for faster data service as the bit rate at the air interface increases with the advance of the wireless technology (i.e. 3.5G and 4G). One example of 4G networks is LTE (3GPP Release 8 and beyond), another is WiMax (IEEE802.16e and beyond). Given the limited available spectrum, the capacity becomes a serious issue for conventional macro cell. The capacity issue has caused a shift in cellular network deployment paradigm from well partitioned large coverage macro cells to densely deployed smaller cells (e.g. picocell and femtocell), many being added dynamically in non-fixed locations.
Today's SONs (i.e. self configuration and provision) are not sufficient for densely deployed small cells to operate properly. SONs capable of coordinating among neighboring cells on radio resource allocation is essential for densely deployed small cells to operate properly.